Famous figures who had Titanic tickets but didn't make it onboard

Hershey and his wife, Catherine, spent their winters on the French Riviera as they got older. In December 1911, the couple left for another extended European vacation and, for their return journey, Hershey wrote a $300 check from the Hershey Trust Company to the White Star Line to reserve places on the maiden voyage of the company's brand-new ship, the Titanic.

According to Lancaster History, pressing business matters forced Hershey to cut his vacation short, and he left Europe just days before the Titanic would set sail, instead heading home on a German liner called the Amerika, which would later warn the Titanic about the dangerous amount of ice.

Hershey's canceled check is still in the possession of the Hershey Community Archives, and you can view it online.

"I've never been able to find an authoritative 1912 source explaining the exact reason why J. P. Morgan cancelled his passage on the Titanic,"  Titanic expert George Behe told Reuters in 2021. Some posited reasons were that he was in bad health, or that he was having issues in customs due to his art collection.

However, we do know that Morgan, the co-founder of General Electric, International Harvester, and US Steel, was also the founder of the International Mercantile Marine, which in turn owned White Star Line. According to the Washington Post, he was even on hand to witness its 1911 launch.

"Monetary losses amount to nothing in life," Morgan said to a New York Times reporter after the sinking. "It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death."

You might know that Marconi was considered a hero after the sinking of the Titanic because, due to his invention of the wireless radio, the ships in the surrounding area knew where to look for the lifeboats.

But did you know that he was almost on board the ship himself? According to his daughter Degna's 1926 book, "My Father, Marconi," he was offered a free ticket aboard the Titanic. But because his personal stenographer got seasick, Marconi opted to sail to the US on the Lusitania, because he trusted that ship's stenographer more than Titanic's.

Visitors to New York City might recognize Frick's name from the Frick Collection or the Henry Clay Frick House. He was an important industrialist and patron of the arts — and he was close to sailing on the doomed voyage.

"The Fricks booked the suite first, and then Mrs. Frick sprained her ankle while they were in Europe buying art and touring and things; so, they stayed behind to get medical attention," historian Melanie Linn Gutowski told CBS Pittsburgh in 2012.

"The suite that they booked, that some historians think that they booked, was some kind of savior suite in a way," she continued. "Everybody who booked it managed to survive either by not being on the ship, or jumping into a lifeboat at the last minute."

Eventually, the tickets made their way to J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line. Controversially, he was one of the few men to make their way on to a lifeboat and survive. He was criticized for this for the rest of his life.

As a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was a well-known member of New York society — so there was media coverage when it was revealed he'd narrowly escaped the Titanic.

Unfortunately, just a few years later, he was aboard the British ocean liner Lusitania, which was sunk by German U-boats in 1915. He was one of the 1,200 passengers who did not survive the attack.

Dreiser wrote about his brush with disaster in his 1913 memoir, "A Traveler at Forty." The section, titled "The Voyage Home" was called "one of the most gripping chapters in the memoir" by Slate.

According to Dreiser, he wanted to sail home with all the rich and powerful people aboard the Titanic to get a peek at how the other half lived, but his publisher convinced him to sail home on the cheaper ship Kroonland, two days before Titanic sank.

"The terror of the sea had come swiftly and directly home to all," Dreiser wrote, according to Slate. "To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!"

Mott, the longtime leader of the YMCA and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was another near-miss. According to Gorden R. Doss, a professor at Andrews University, Mott came close to death a few times.

First, he skipped the Titanic and opted for the Lapland. Three decades later, in 1943, he narrowly avoided a train crash.

According to Sotheby's, Mott, upon hearing about the sinking, was quoted as saying, "The Good Lord must have more work for us to do."

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the founder of JCPenney was all set to sail on the Titanic's second voyage to England to the US.

As the Akron Beacon Journal reported, Seiberling — the co-founder of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company — and his wife frequently traveled to England and were huge admirers of English architecture. But one of their trips was postponed when their ship out of the states, the Titanic, sank.

Smithsonian Magazine also reported that Dix, the governor of New York from 1911 to 1913, was on the passenger list of the Titanic's return trip to England.

"My ship, the Titanic, is on her way," Adams, a historian, wrote in a letter on April 12, 1912, "and unless she drops me somewhere else, I should get to Cherbourg in a fortnight." As history tells, Adams was never able to board the ship and was forced to book passage elsewhere, The New Republic's Timothy Noah wrote.